Going Back

[ateolf]

We went and saw an Indie Memphis screening of I Heard It through the Grapevine last night. It's this documentary about James Baldwin going back to the places of the Civil Rights movement in 1980 (and largely carrying a message that things only changed on the surface with regard to race in the US). I put up the promo video for next week's show on youtube. While doing so I noticed that I messed up the part where the logo is moving across the screen in the beginning. The two images used for it are overlapping instead of next to each other. I had just come off a good bout of fighting them having a gap between them and didn't notice they were slightly off the other way. Pretty annoying to see that after working so long on it, but it did take me a while to notice so maybe it's not too noticeable. But still. Anyway...

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Comments

[ifjuly]

i appreciated that the film and baldwin et al go further and indicate things are in fact worse, that the backlash is eye-opening, scale-falling monstrosity in terms of its WTF outsized reaction (o lewis law and faludi's backlash...and more recently post-obama insanity) and sneakiness, murkiness, underhandedness (oh and relatedly, how they learned from it that yeah, using economics in place of outright visible nastiness is very effective and oh by the way, now that's been exported--well, wrong term for it really, colonialism means the other way round both spatially and temporally, but you know what i mean--globally and cannot be escaped). and the toxic combination of, they got sneakier and way the hell more serious about keeping things as they are at any cost (blatant repetitive on-every-TV obvious murder, then crack and AIDS and the youth lifetime prison industrial complex! goddamn), while yeah, surface/optics have many lulled into assuming that's all in the past (so familiarrrrr! now i'm thinking of what that dirty dancing writer was saying about Roe and younger women's assumptions)...more recently actually beyond that, worse than that, social media oligarch 1%ers convincing everyone who might care that fashioning, fixating on optics is what _will_ save them, when it decidedly will not and is very obviously at this point a way to keep you busy and distracted while actual concrete resources and political freedoms continue getting siphoned away (i see it functionally as the packaged-for-secular-millennials version of dangled-carrot-to-keep-you-going church-inflected american brightsiding--you have to feel you can do SOMETHING and it could make a difference, and they know how to use that to their advantage, funnel that basic need to ineffectiveness--and that too has only gotten worse and more nefarious, bc the platforms everyone is doing their optics work on, trying to communicate and disseminate on, they literally own, present/rank-sort/organize opaquely to their own ends how and when they like (to at this point clearly known nefarious psychological and political purposes), sleight-of-hand/beg-the-question-style widespread normalize dehumanizing marketing techniques, and spy on you on in every conceivable way!). augh.

...

i keep thinking about the academic panel scene part. i thought it was really great and i know i'll be thinking about it for a long time.